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what do you hope to gain by talking to them? I'm assuming that by capital A, versus lowercase a; atheists, you are trying to underscore the differences between

by ldehaan 10y ago

what do you hope to gain by talking to them? I'm assuming that by capital A, versus lowercase a; atheists, you are trying to underscore the differences between people who understand that religion is a hoax but it doesn't affect me right now so I'll let it pass, and those who have been directly affected by religion and it's evils and see no other way but to fight it as hard as they push it? I will try to explain why this is bad: engaging the mentally ill in their delusions is not only mean (you don't believe their crazy stories, so why listen to them?) it's bad for society as a whole, because this is a untreated mental illness that is totally treatable and it's being spread because people refuse to treat it as a mental illness and instead say, believe what you want. why is it bad to allow the masses to remain ignorant? you (hopefully) wouldn't teach your children that the world is flat, because you were educated against such teachings. you wouldn't teach a medical student about the human body without allowing them to learn about the human body by cutting it open and studying it. you wouldn't let your neighbor spray your yard with ddt (hopefully) because a higher being told him it was safe. you wouldn't take advice from someone on the Internet without first researching the topic (we all do) yet we'll freely entertain the insanity of religion because why? so many people believe it? we all thought the world was flat, the human body was designed by God and shouldn't be examined, sprayed ddt right in our children's faces, and still take advice from strangers on the Internet without doing research because, we're sheep (hanlons razor). it's all stupidity, and fear. we're all alone, there is no guidebook and we're so painfully self aware. when you have No explanation, any explanation seems possible. the world is not flat, but knowing we knew, was comforting. anyways, what was I trying to get at? don't let them in. keep them very far away from you. if you want to help change the world, be proactive. openly challenge religious beliefs any time they are presented. it could get you killed. it will get you beaten. but we all have a duty to further the human species, and putting us second to imaginary beings is not exactly the way to go about it IMO.

a3n 10y ago
> what do you hope to gain by talking to them? They're people in my community. I like to be friendly with my neighbors, if not actual friends.
morganvachon 10y ago
It's not a mental illness to have faith in something. Faith is a normal part of being human. Even atheists have faith: Faith in their own belief that there are no gods or other supernatural beings. They don't have empirical evidence that there are no higher beings, just as religious types don't have empirical evidence that such beings exist. On a smaller scale, one can have faith in one's own abilities or those of the people around them. Once again, not a mental illness. Now, I'll concede that religion is a manmade concept, usually a way for those who seek power over others to achieve it. But faith and religion are two completely different things. There are those who believe in a higher power (God? Gods? Spirits? Aliens? Cthulhu?) who are anti-religion, just as there are those who have no true faith in a higher power but use religion to further an agenda (militant extremists and terrorists come to mind, both foreign and domestic). To put it another way, religion is an institution, faith is human nature. You have faith in the words you wrote; does that make you mentally ill? No, of course not, you just come off as having a huge chip on your shoulder and a predisposition for painting everyone in a billions-strong group with the same brush. But that's a typical human flaw, not a documented mental illness.
- ldehaan 10y ago
  i really liked your reply :) while I agree I think faith is a bit more than just human nature, I think it's a mechanism developed over centuries to deal with the unknown while our minds continued to expand to understand the unknown. I think of it as a bug, maybe a little hack that was put in to deal with situations that defy explanation. it helps us come up with explanations, it has a function to deal with unexplained events without loosing our mental model of the world. faith is like a shim, there is a piece of a mental model that doesn't exist and doesn't fit with your platform, so faith exists as a way into shim that difference into your code base. religion is code that takes advantage of the shim. however religion is a virus and it takes over your other mental faculties, weakening them. introducing functions that make no sense, but will continue to run until your mind finds a place for them. there are several ways to take advantage of the faith bug but you can see patterns for different types of systems that use faith hooks to make calls to your reason centers and overrides their output. the more these calls override the reason centers the less they are used. now the point at which the faith bug is the most susceptible to being utilized is during the brains formative years, and this tactic is used incredibly frequently. so I see and agree with your point that religion is an institution and faith is a function of humanity, but faith is a bug that can be patched and I also would argue that faith is too broad a term for the reasoning functionality of the brain. faith is a good word to use when we lack the proper terms, but personal and religious faith are a small subset of the entire faith function and I think it needs to be broken up into its requisite parts. and maybe the overall function that applies to religion in context to faith is world-model_update(previous_model, new_viewpoint, contextual_conviction/external_conviction) and It seems to me that there is early injection malware in religious code and buffer overflow tricks when you can't get the early injection code to work. thanks for the reply :)
eyelidlessness 10y ago
> I'm assuming that by capital A, versus lowercase a; atheists, you are trying to underscore the differences between people who understand that religion is a hoax but it doesn't affect me right now so I'll let it pass, and those who have been directly affected by religion and it's evils and see no other way but to fight it as hard as they push it? I can't speak for the other poster, nor for a capital/lowercase distinction, but your own distinction fails to include me. To me, religion inhabits a spectrum ranging from vague reverence for the numinous, through stories (either parable or claimed history) told for moral direction, to cynical, doctrinaire oppression. I have directly experienced some of each category (though not the most extreme of the oppressive end). That latter category absolutely affects me, both in terms of solidarity and threat of future expansion, and it absolutely deserves a rigorous fight. The rest is not so cut and dry, and some of it certainly does deserve to be not just allowed to "pass" but to be protected. With that said... > what do you hope to gain by talking to them? A lot can be gained by talking to people you disagree with, even people you fiercely oppose. Aside from the other poster's excellent answer ("I like to be friendly with my neighbors, if not actual friends"), engaging ideas that you don't share is a good cure for your own ignorance and may provide ammunition for the battles actually worth having. > don't let them in. keep them very far away from you. Your post suggests that you go beyond your claim that religion is a "mental illness", that you seem to believe said illness is contagious even to the unafflicted. Have a little more confidence in your convictions!
- ldehaan 10y ago
  thank you for your answer :) as far as; is it contagious? yes, it's incredibly contagious, in the sense of a virus and how viruses are spread. We have two immune systems in our minds, logic and fear. Logic tells me when something is feasible. and fear tells me when it's not. religion overrides logic with fear to hook into your faith subroutine and take it over. everyone is susceptible to this attack, but those who are poor, hungry and desperate for something better are more susceptible than others. so while talking to your neighbors is good and all, you and your kids are now more susceptible to attack and all it will take is getting you when you're at your weakest, and they'll be there, waiting. it sounds more nefarious than you think it is, but they, like men with women, are only there for a single reason. theirs is different but singular as well: to infect your mind with fear and self doubt and open the way for religion to come in and take over. and once it does and your fully in, it doesn't matter if you change your mind later, because now you have to change your families minds, and they may be more affected than you depending on their defenses. and kids have none. and so now you're stuck and you make excuses and stick up for your lapse in judgement and infect others because you're totally bought in. I've seen it too many times for it to be a one off. I've been told by so many religious men that they are only in it because their wife/family is. but they don't understand that by letting it happen they're creating Another generation of logically weakened humans. and therein is my issue, religion makes us weaker, easier to dominate and placate. religion is a virus.

by ldehaan 10y ago

a3n 10y ago

> what do you hope to gain by talking to them? They're people in my community. I like to be friendly with my neighbors, if not actual friends.

morganvachon 10y ago

It's not a mental illness to have faith in something. Faith is a normal part of being human. Even atheists have faith: Faith in their own belief that there are no gods or other supernatural beings. They don't have empirical evidence that there are no higher beings, just as religious types don't have empirical evidence that such beings exist. On a smaller scale, one can have faith in one's own abilities or those of the people around them. Once again, not a mental illness. Now, I'll concede that religion is a manmade concept, usually a way for those who seek power over others to achieve it. But faith and religion are two completely different things. There are those who believe in a higher power (God? Gods? Spirits? Aliens? Cthulhu?) who are anti-religion, just as there are those who have no true faith in a higher power but use religion to further an agenda (militant extremists and terrorists come to mind, both foreign and domestic). To put it another way, religion is an institution, faith is human nature. You have faith in the words you wrote; does that make you mentally ill? No, of course not, you just come off as having a huge chip on your shoulder and a predisposition for painting everyone in a billions-strong group with the same brush. But that's a typical human flaw, not a documented mental illness.

ldehaan 10y ago
i really liked your reply :) while I agree I think faith is a bit more than just human nature, I think it's a mechanism developed over centuries to deal with the unknown while our minds continued to expand to understand the unknown. I think of it as a bug, maybe a little hack that was put in to deal with situations that defy explanation. it helps us come up with explanations, it has a function to deal with unexplained events without loosing our mental model of the world. faith is like a shim, there is a piece of a mental model that doesn't exist and doesn't fit with your platform, so faith exists as a way into shim that difference into your code base. religion is code that takes advantage of the shim. however religion is a virus and it takes over your other mental faculties, weakening them. introducing functions that make no sense, but will continue to run until your mind finds a place for them. there are several ways to take advantage of the faith bug but you can see patterns for different types of systems that use faith hooks to make calls to your reason centers and overrides their output. the more these calls override the reason centers the less they are used. now the point at which the faith bug is the most susceptible to being utilized is during the brains formative years, and this tactic is used incredibly frequently. so I see and agree with your point that religion is an institution and faith is a function of humanity, but faith is a bug that can be patched and I also would argue that faith is too broad a term for the reasoning functionality of the brain. faith is a good word to use when we lack the proper terms, but personal and religious faith are a small subset of the entire faith function and I think it needs to be broken up into its requisite parts. and maybe the overall function that applies to religion in context to faith is world-model_update(previous_model, new_viewpoint, contextual_conviction/external_conviction) and It seems to me that there is early injection malware in religious code and buffer overflow tricks when you can't get the early injection code to work. thanks for the reply :)

eyelidlessness 10y ago

> I'm assuming that by capital A, versus lowercase a; atheists, you are trying to underscore the differences between people who understand that religion is a hoax but it doesn't affect me right now so I'll let it pass, and those who have been directly affected by religion and it's evils and see no other way but to fight it as hard as they push it? I can't speak for the other poster, nor for a capital/lowercase distinction, but your own distinction fails to include me. To me, religion inhabits a spectrum ranging from vague reverence for the numinous, through stories (either parable or claimed history) told for moral direction, to cynical, doctrinaire oppression. I have directly experienced some of each category (though not the most extreme of the oppressive end). That latter category absolutely affects me, both in terms of solidarity and threat of future expansion, and it absolutely deserves a rigorous fight. The rest is not so cut and dry, and some of it certainly does deserve to be not just allowed to "pass" but to be protected. With that said... > what do you hope to gain by talking to them? A lot can be gained by talking to people you disagree with, even people you fiercely oppose. Aside from the other poster's excellent answer ("I like to be friendly with my neighbors, if not actual friends"), engaging ideas that you don't share is a good cure for your own ignorance and may provide ammunition for the battles actually worth having. > don't let them in. keep them very far away from you. Your post suggests that you go beyond your claim that religion is a "mental illness", that you seem to believe said illness is contagious even to the unafflicted. Have a little more confidence in your convictions!

ldehaan 10y ago
thank you for your answer :) as far as; is it contagious? yes, it's incredibly contagious, in the sense of a virus and how viruses are spread. We have two immune systems in our minds, logic and fear. Logic tells me when something is feasible. and fear tells me when it's not. religion overrides logic with fear to hook into your faith subroutine and take it over. everyone is susceptible to this attack, but those who are poor, hungry and desperate for something better are more susceptible than others. so while talking to your neighbors is good and all, you and your kids are now more susceptible to attack and all it will take is getting you when you're at your weakest, and they'll be there, waiting. it sounds more nefarious than you think it is, but they, like men with women, are only there for a single reason. theirs is different but singular as well: to infect your mind with fear and self doubt and open the way for religion to come in and take over. and once it does and your fully in, it doesn't matter if you change your mind later, because now you have to change your families minds, and they may be more affected than you depending on their defenses. and kids have none. and so now you're stuck and you make excuses and stick up for your lapse in judgement and infect others because you're totally bought in. I've seen it too many times for it to be a one off. I've been told by so many religious men that they are only in it because their wife/family is. but they don't understand that by letting it happen they're creating Another generation of logically weakened humans. and therein is my issue, religion makes us weaker, easier to dominate and placate. religion is a virus.